Hacker News Reader

phreackon OpenAI Has New Focus (on the IPO)

If I end up using ChatGPT for any reason, I always preface with something like "2 sentences maximum. No emojis. Be professional." at the very least. It tends to improve things a bit.

phreackon In a genre where spoilers are devastating, how do we talk about puzzle games?

I took something away from this article. While I enjoyed Blue Prince very much even though I played it alone, the surprisingly most enjoyable aspect of the game came externally - it was (and is) following my friends' journey through the game and being there to give them custom made consensual spoiler-free, hints when they needed. Some times simply being told you're barking up a very wrong tree or that you don't have enough information yet is exactly what you need to not get burnt out. I keep wondering if there's a way to have that baked into the game. Something to brainstorm.

phreackon I was banned from Claude for scaffolding a Claude.md file?

Wait what? Really? All caps is a bannable offense? That should be in all caps, pardon me, in the terms of use if that's the case. Even more so since there's no support at the highest price point.

phreackon EmuDevz: A game about developing emulators

There's links on the homepage to the soundtrack and credits, the artist is called Synthenia.

phreackon EmuDevz: A game about developing emulators

I'm amazed at the amount of work and love that's in this game, that you can play for free. I hope it helps more devs get into the retro scene!

phreackon Nova Launcher added Facebook and Google Ads tracking

I would honestly have stayed in version 6 of Nova because of the as yet unrecreated magical feature of allowing unread count badges on the home screen for many popular apps, that are not tied to notifications, via TeslaUnread. I've been trying to reverse engineer it a bit to see if I can recreate the functionality somehow, but all I've managed to figure out is that the icons are really widgets that look like icons and run _something_.

Features like that one, and browser text reflow, are such must haves to me that we used to have a decade ago and lost along the way for no good reason, it's frustrating.

phreackon Apple testing new App Store design that blurs the line between ads and results

If an iPhone is going to be as bad as an Android like that then what's the point. The "premium" feeling is eroded like this.

phreackon Open Chaos: A self-evolving open-source project

https://github.com/skridlevsky/openchaos?tab=readme-ov-file#...

Anyone makes a PR, there's a vote and highest voted one gets merged every week. It's marvelous.

phreackon Microsoft denies rewriting Windows 11 in Rust using AI

The "and _algorithms_" part of it even sounds like a parody.

phreackon People keep flocking to Linux, not just to escape Windows

Win <= 10 had left side taskbars so that should actually be a plus. I didn't quickly update to Win 11 because of it being in the middle really, then because of the ads, then swore off it because of the AI stuff so in the end it kind of helped that they messed up the UI.

phreackon People keep flocking to Linux, not just to escape Windows

Same here, now running Fedora KDE but with an Nvidia card it is exceedingly buggy. Doing a single system update the normal way made the kernel version unbootable. I also had some (I suspect) OOM related full freezed that forced me to hard shut off the computer. The UX is really that good though when things work.

phreackon Slop Detective – Fight the Slop Syndicate

What bugs me the most about nearly everyone selling AI products is that they apparently want or need to believe in the power of LLMs for everything, not just the product, and this means that they also generate the explanatory texts and descriptions and readmes and... it makes the product itself feel of a much worse quality.

I don't mind that you're selling an AI product if it's good but at least put some humanity on the marketing side.

phreackon Steam Machine

I had to install the app to try and work around a problem with Steam, and then had the same problems just browsing. You can probably disable that behavior, but I ended up just uninstalling the app entirely.

The support experience was so bad that I got really soured on Valve, and can't even get excited for these announcements now.

phreackon YouTube Removes Windows 11 Bypass Tutorials, Claims 'Risk of Physical Harm'

It's like they want people to bypass Windows 11 altogether. I've finally bit the bullet and gone to Linux recently. Certainly dying by 512 cuts and counting, not for the faint of heart, but I'm surprised at how much of my daily usage I've been able to replicate. I'd say 80% of life works, unlike previous attempts.

phreackon The RSS feed reader landscape

I was surprised not to see the one I use daily, Brief. Maybe it's not on Chrome or something, but it hasn't failed me in like decades.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/brief/

phreackon Cursed Knowledge

Love this. I seem to find a new one every day maintaining an Android app with millions of users. We like to call them "what will we tell the kids" moments. It's a great idea to write them down, I'll probably start doing it!

phreackon Internet Roadtrip: Vote to steer

We're closer than we were before!

phreackon First American pope elected and will be known as Pope Leo XIV

As I understand it, the people from Pakistan and Bangladesh mostly prefer the South Asia denomination and don't consider themselves Indians, while South Americans do consider themselves Americans, so it's a different case.

phreackon AI code is legacy code?

> Side note: It would be really interesting to see a website that generates all the pages every time a user requests them, every time you navigate back it would look the same, but some buttons in different places, the live chat is in a different corner, the settings now have a vertical sidebar instead of a horizontal menu.

So, Instagram?

phreackon Creating Bluey: Tales from the Art Director

Pessimistically, I'd then imagine they get burnt by Hollywood accounting and end up fully empty handed

phreackon The movie mistake mystery from "Revenge of the Sith"

This is why archiving is such a worthwhile endeavor. We could end up losing the original movies otherwise!

phreackon JetBrains Fleet drops support for Kotlin Multiplatform

I think how awful making run configurations is, is the one worst aspect of VSCode. tasks.json? launch.json? I just want the "run" button to run a custom build command and I could just not figure it out.

phreackon JetBrains Fleet drops support for Kotlin Multiplatform

Honestly the hieroglyphic buttons are a deal breaker for me. It's just a cognitive load I can't overcome without frustration. The vertical labels were just perfect and Jetbrains actively ignores feedback on that. On a second place, not having bottom toolbars anymore is such a downgrade! I would use it to have a convenient console at hand constantly. I did use the Git buttons constantly, and now it's either hard or impossible to customize some buttons, plus they'll be hieroglyphical. And at the end, I just don't like how there's less information like where my file is located (as in, "which index.js was I looking at?"), visual separators marking button borders and tab borders are now gone, and so on.

Now, there's the classic plugin but it's got an expiration date. I also could get used to all of this, and I did, I migrated to VSCode. It has a surprising (yet hilariously complex) amount of theming options and I got the contrast to previous JB defaults. Because Jetbrains' communication has been just awful throughout this change these past couple of years, I just don't trust them anymore to not destroy my workflow on a whim, it's a portent of enshittification.

phreackon Why do War Thunder players leak classified information? [video]

They used to pay by the view, now they pay by the minute. I think it's that simple.

phreackon Promising results from DeepSeek R1 for code

Honestly, I spent some time trying to script a graphic editing pipeline with either GIMP or magick, and no available model got me even close. DeepSeek specifically gaslit me with nonexistant CLI options, then claiming they did exist but were just "undocumented" when asked for source links.

Right now these can only help with things I already know how to do (so I don't need them in the first place), and waste my time when I go slightly off the beaten path.

phreackon The FizzBuzz that did not get me the job

That last part is key. Way better than FizzBuzz from scratch, best interview results I've seen come from giving a candidate a pre-made solution or architecture document that technically works but with glaring issues and just talking about their opinion on it, coding or pseudocoding optional for presenting solutions.

phreackon UI is hell: four-function calculators

To this day I can not remember which is which in calcs with clearing buttons. I know probably one of them clears the operator and the other clears the whole operation, but since I'll never figure out the correct one I just start pressing everything when I want to start over and hope.

phreackon Using 2 Editors Because Xcode Is Dumb

XCode has always been such a disaster. I've been doing iOS dev on and off for over a decade and while the developer experience was not good at first, somehow it got consistently worse every year.

Even know I have no idea what some unlabeled icons are supposed to mean and have to stumble and guess where critical tools are, discovery is just terrible. Friends who don't have to use it normally react "and people live like this?" when first seeing the kind of things you have to do in a regular daily workflow.

I also decided very quickly to just use two editors way back then - Appcode first and then hilariously even Jetbrains gave up. Nowadays with fastlane I can luckily keep my XCode interactions to a minimum.

phreackon Cognitive load is what matters

Another prong in the cognitive load fork that's trying to stab you when working, is the UX of your tools.

That is absolutely personal, but it pays off massively in the long term to build out a development environment that you're comfortable with. If it's an IDE, you can try to recognize pain points like nested tools you use often and bring them to the front via new buttons or learning hotkeys.

UI is also important, in "modern" IDEs there's an awful trend of not labeling icons, so I strictly use one that does so I don't have to juggle "which doodle is the Git button again" on top of my actual work cognitive load.

phreackon If not React, then what?

I call that "developer happiness". It's extremely subjective but yeah, writing and then maintaining React code makes me the most happy in the best case scenarios, makes me feel like I can do more with less, it's easy for me to read and design. I feel like I have more friction with other JS tools.